Bio Doggerel

Recently, I gave a talk in South Africa at the Academy of Self Knowledge's annual conference - this year's theme being The Universal Message of the Qur'an - and got into a small flap as one of the speakers before me was asked to introduce himself. Since I hadn't actually supplied the moderator with any bio-data on myself, and since I had barely even met him, I hastily scribbled something down on the back of my lecture notes and in about 15 minutes this is what came out. I can't claim its poetry. Doggerel maybe. But it raised a few laughs, and, well... it just about sums up my bio.

Born in Kirkuk
raised in Beirut
schooled in Berkshire UK
& Texas US of A

Grabbed by Islam
saved from true harm
my heritage claimed me
I submitted gamely

Blessed with good parents
a father who made sense
a mother whose call
was to love God above all

Sent the gift of Abbas
a husband 'fust' class
Sojourn in Pakistan
followed by Englestan

Editing was my toil
my service, my joy
til then at long last
more study at SOAS

Kids came - a blessing
a new space of learning
Again to Pakistan
for the sake of Abbas-jan

The call of the heart
pulsing in an arc
drawing me here
my shaykh to be near

Plans now afoot
our home here to put
among sincere friends
a new chapter begins

Veldt Therapy on Wheels

Sometimes nature does what words cannot do: set you right.


Sometimes, all the good advice in the world, all the homilies, parables, and goodly pious sayings cannot seep through your eardrums and into your consciousness as easily as the veldt unfolding before you, majestically, in great undulations of corn, cattle and pixellated pink and white cosmos. Land is linked with sky as streams, rivers, water holes and dams stud the swathes of farmland and try to pull down a sky so vast it merely puffs back the most enormous cumuli and carries on. Giant poplars, cypress and  eucalyptus occasionally spring up - mere shrubs in the scale, emeralds among in the citrines, ambers, agates, bloodstones and aquamarines.

The veldt goes straight to the heart. It fills it with awe and then bursts its membranes, for there is no way the human heart can contain the pulverising majesty of such beauty.

How, I marvel, does it do this? The veldt, after all, is but a plateau grassland. It offers neither the drama of cliffs or mountain ranges, nor the graphic starkness of desert, and certainly not the soporific lushness of tropical climes. It is neither decidedly vertical nor relentlessly flat. And yet it is superlative in its own horizon smashing idiom. Almost like a record-busting giant orchestra with half the players on trombones.

I travel through it, of course, on wheels of rubber and steel powered by liquid black gold. Bitumen- smooth asphalt slides me along, gulping up kilometres in a way no hardy pioneer ever dreamed of. For them the seemingly endless tufts of grass were not giant lawns to trundle over in ox-carts. They were fraught with pits and gullies and snake holes and flies and small boulders lying in ambush. Days might stretch into months before a destination was reached. Death might overcome them before a land claim might be secured. No twee hedgerows here to offer a sense of possession. And beefy bovines reduce to fleas on the coat of some shaggy, behemothic creature. Vague notions of history add to my awe, but don't explain what the veldt does to my heart.

Firstly it silences it. I want to take it all in. Then sometimes I confess some silly ooh-ahh statement wants to erupt from my mouth - 'Just like a painting!'

Why must we compare stunning landscapes to paintings? What is this perverse inversion? How can we compare something natural with a copy of the natural, as if by doing so we ensure we can consume a third degree removed semblance of the original. Its almost as if we hardly look at the beauty face on, but prefer to do so obliquely, after a painting has rendered the landscape almost as beautiful as itself. The remove makes it bearable. Shades of the 'Verse of Light'? The Niche, layers of glass, light refracted and reflected?... Ok, you got it.

Were we to look at it head on, we might vanish. The 'we', the 'me', doing the looking might just get snuffed out by sheer awe and beyond-descriptionness.

But I like to stare at it. I insist on trying to take it all in. I want to let it flood me. And at times it has. I have encountered sublimity by doing so. Its another form of fana'. Fana' fi'l-vista. Obliteration by the view. The self dissolved in the scene. Seamlessly at one with the land, sky and grass.

This therapy for the separated self I discovered many moons ago, while atop the highest hilltop in Belfast, Mpumalanga. And in between I forget its power. And every now and then I am lucky enough to taste veldt therapy again.

A Fatihah please for Bibi (Fadhila Mehdi Hamoodi, my grandmother), for she too lies buried there, in the Veldt. Inna lillah wa inna ilayhi raji'un.

Time to WAKE up

No time for cynicism. 

No time for government intervention. 

No time to wait for someone else.

Time to end these genocidal massacres.

Time to end the blind hatred.

Time to put up mirrors.

Time to erase the notion of 'other'.

Time to realize there is no 'other'.  

Time to wake up.

Good Idols - Poem

Good Idols - Poem

The nafs of do-gooding.

Still a self form.

A better one,

but nevertheless,

still involving identification

with action and form.

Do-gooding can be addictive.

Once that becomes the primary prism

through which you habitually self-regard,

attachment arises 

to the impulse and process

of doing good. At any cost.

Or almost any cost.

Once you see this

is holding you back,

how do you free yourself?

By striking out in a Malamati direction?

Perhaps - generate self-blame.

Walk out halfway through prayer in the mosque?

Or fart noisily and carry on praying?

Break fast in the middle of the day?

How about just saying no?

How about letting go of the need

to be seen - self-seen - 

to do the right thing,

go the extra mile, 

bust a chop.

See how your nafs reacts

when suddenly you aren’t compliant

with every call for help,

with every assumption that you’ll be there 

to pick up the slack,

with your reputation for reliability.

It’s an idol alright,

a squat, lurid one,

like a laughing fat Buddha,

with a grimace carved into the face

rather than an abandoned laugh.

Watch it tremble and shiver.

Are you ready to?

I’ll give you a head’s up: it’s l-i-b-e-r-a-t-i-n-g.

Stripped!

Your soul sighs relief as your nafs deflates.

You can even hear the hissssssssssssss.

But mind you don't habitualize self-blame,

for you'd be carving yet another idol.

 

©Muna H. Bilgrami 2013

Glossary:

Nafs: ego-self. Has foolish aspirations to independence.

Malamati: deliberate engagement in actions that generate self-blame, so as to realize that the self is imperfect and become unattached to anything other than Allah; arose as a trend among Sufis in 8th C in Iran.

'I'm Dying'

 
'Mum,' said Josh a couple of years ago to me by way of casual conversation, 'It's very hard to have a normal conversation with Granpa. Whenever you ask him how he is, he just says "I'm dying!"'

The casualness and acuity of Josh's observation made me chuckle deep and loud, as of course his grandfather has always enjoyed extremely good health (for which his family is exceedingly grateful!).

That we are dying every moment is true for all of us, but nonetheless a no-play rejoinder to a conventional conversation starter. Especially with a kid!

Death for the spiritually awakened is not a grim prospect, but a welcome one - celebrated by many Sufis as a wedding of reunification (urs) with the Source of all existence.

Death surrounded by blood and gore and terror brings with it sadness and grief for the trauma and suffering endured. But generally, a breath breathed from a still and luminous heart is one that heralds a new state, far greater and more enduring than the chimera of this life.

I grew up with the following Sufi adage often repeated: 'The Sufi cries when someone is born and laughs when someone dies.'

The explanation for this contra-flow to social norms is that once born into this world of illusion and distraction, man has to journey through a process of learning to inhabit his earthly body and to fully subscribe to all the biological realities and social values his life brings him. From a state of unconscious gatheredness he has to learn to negotiate the separations of existence, much of it painfully. Separation from unconscious being, separation from the womb, separation from the breast, from the home, from school, from the familiar, from comfort zones, from health,  from spouses and children, from friends, from attachments  - the list is endless.

All the while he is impelled from within to seek a unifying thread connecting his origin with his end, whether he realizes this or not. Through varying mixes of disillusionment, worship, unveiling and devotion he can steal glances and visions of the 'world' beyond. Greater openings into the unseen Reality behind this contingent-filled reality come as gifts bestowed upon those ready to receive them, that is, those who are willing to let themselves experience a sensory death. Ultimately the greatest breakthrough to a transcendent, ineffable state that soars above the limiting planes of existence will be through physical death - and for that the Sufi has cause to celebrate. Finally the journeyer knows. He has returned. Joy!

The tragedy of being ripped from roots which Rumi instructs us to hear in the plaintiff, haunting tones of the reed-flute accompanies the dramatic sub-stories of life. Death and life come together as bridesmaids to life, as well as bride and groom. A mother has to be wiling to face her own death in giving birth to her child. The warrior worth his salt has to himself disappear into his art and become the weapon. The artist journeys through beauty and wonder away from her structured self as she hearkens to the formless light of her soul. The meditator has to extinguish sensory input and mental acrobatics to find death-like stillness within from which indescribable depths of joy and peace (nothingness, infinity) can be tasted.

Maybe Josh's rejoinder  to his Granpa's 'I'm dying' should have been 'So you can live?!'

Poem - Presence

From your Presence I scooped
A cupful of balm that soothed
My heart and soul and mood
Nourishing me with spirit food

In your gentle Presence I swam
In cascading pools that ran
From tender to sweet and lamb
Soft, warm and cool, every gram

Swaddled in butter-silk love
Top to toe, below and above
Kid-smoothe, well-fitted, I've
Felt united as hand in glove

Absorbed by this sinuous dance
Immunized against happenstance
Banished from false distance
A state regained from Your glance.

Happy New Year or Temporal Neophilia

A new year dawns. A new year of man's reckoning, as significant a milestone as we collectively wish it to be. Is it worth celebrating the new year? The local authorities where I live are clearly ambivalent about this, oscillating between acceptance (the port authorities hosted a massive fireworks display) and rejection (shutting down restaurants and blocking off roads).

Maybe the magic is the potential impregnated into the word 'new' and is nothing to do with the year at all? Maybe what attracts us is not the passage of time so much as the novelty we associate with its coming.
'New' signifies hope, fresh starts, better times, the chance to transform into a better version of ourselves.
Yet we can do that or choose to do that every day of the year because every day is new. For that matter, every moment is new, every second! Every moment is full of potential for revolution, for change, for becoming what we may be. The Qur'an tells us that every day He is in a state of Glory or upon a new affair - with the word for 'day' (yawm) meaning more than simply 24 hours but a unit of time.

As Muslims we are somewhat robbed of the idea of giddy and slightly crazed new year festivity which secular cultures bring to their ushering in of the solar Gregorian new year. The events of Karbala will forever cast an ignominious shadow over the beginning of the lunar Islamic calendar. This heinous and shameful episode in our history looms as a reminder that one can never forget the depths of treachery, disloyalty and lust for power to which human beings are susceptible. Instead our new year starts us off  introspectively, with deep reflection on what it means to be a Muslim, and with a sense of humility and awe at the sacrifice of Imam Hussain (as) and his extended family. And deep distaste for what so-called  Muslims do to Muslims.What can there be to celebrate when the beloved family of the Holy Prophet (S) was massacred and chopped down so eagerly? Even now every day we see Karbala revisited in what goes on between those who profess to follow the religion of peaceful submission.

Actually we can celebrate, just not wantonly. We can celebrate the tough choice the Imam made to stick to his beliefs - that rulership had to reflect noble, humble, selfless and god-conscious conduct, to stand up to forces that abused the power of the growing wave of Islam for self-interest and worldly gain. We can celebrate the fact that during this first month of the year, Muharram, in which the battle of Karbala took place, a line was forever drawn in the proverbial sands of time about the true intended nature of Islamic leadership. Needless to say, that model of Islamic leadership has yet to arise on any scale worth noting, though there have been plenty of pious, honourable and visionary Muslims who have led their communities and cities well. We can celebrate the triumph of truth over falsehood.

Having grown up in western oriented or Christian societies in which new year is celebrated, I cannot help but also be affected by a tremor of expectation at what the new year might bring. Even as I know it to be foolish and over-commercialized, the vestiges of my social conditioning still twitch my imagination on the occasion. Of course, the New Year hoohaa is the tail end of the Christmas drama, which in itself was invented as a convenient way of marrying pagan rites with Christian observance and then later Coca Cola got in on the picture.

Maybe we still resonate with the echoes of our pastoral and agri-rural past when we were all consciously locked into the cycles and seasons of sowing, sprouting, harvesting and storing. Modern day amenities like abundant food supplies, plumbing and central heating have inured us to the sheer life/death scenarios of survival, but deeply ingrained in us is the knowing that life is cyclical and somehow we are compelled to mark the beginnings and endings in significant ways so that we can share in a collective history of our community. After all, it is this shared sense of history that shapes us in our individuality as much as our DNA and upbringing.

But the love of the new - neophilia - is irresistible. Apparently our love of novelty is probably hardwired into our brains, according to a recent study; maybe because it  lights up the Ventral Striatum -  the pleasure processor. Or maybe it is because  dopamine is involved in deciding on new ventures. From what I've read, it seems the threat of the new is outweighed by the benefit of trying it out. Even as we seek to perpetuate the familiar for continuity and productivity, we crave the new to satisfy our interest and creativity and the love for being surprised. Its as if we need our apparatus of perception or the affective domain or our EQ to be refreshed and recalibrated.

Maybe the love of the new is the light of the soul pulsating beams into our consciousness, harkening us to a deeply buried secret inherent to the human condition, namely that life itself is a shimmering, glimmering, dazzling miracle. In Surat ul-Mulk in the Qur'an Allah tells us to  'return [your] vision twice again. [Your] vision will return to you humbled while it is fatigued. Other translations render 'fatigued' as 'exhausted', and 'humbled' as 'dull, discomfited' or 'confused'. The implication being that you will feel overwhelmed with witnessing the perfection of creation.

And surely that is why we want the new year to be happy and good for ourselves and for others. Our soul is telling us, 'Look! Do you see any imperfection in it?' And that is the vision with which we are impelled to reconnect. There is always hope, so do not allow the murkiness of your vision to veil you from that potential of experiencing serendipity and a higher order of harmony within your beating breast.

So I pray that in this new year we turn away from man's mad machinations (the angels had a right to complain!) and look instead to be inspired by creation and nature, by its perfect order and symmetry, its astonishing cause and effect, its organically sublime 'pretzality' (my coinage!), its offerings and takings, its awesomeness and exquisiteness, its majesty and beauty.

In this way, I greet you all with a heartfelt prayer for a 'Happy New Year'!